Matthew Arnold said that “Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world,” and I couldn’t disagree more. Sometimes culture is to know the worst that has been said and thought in the world. My friend E. once told me that Auden had once devised a five-tiered system to describe the different levels of art, and that one cannot judge a work of art accurately unless one has determined the category to which it belongs. For instance, The Girls Next Door or The Da Vinci Code might be the lowest of the low, but within their category of “low art” they reign supreme. E. claimed this system appeared in a lecture Auden once gave, and I asked my friend J. (who is an Auden scholar) to confirm, but he claimed to have never heard of it. Perhaps it’s purely apocryphal.
Living in New York can create a sense of discomfort for those of us who don’t consider ourselves the promoters and protectors of “high art.” Some of these people write for Gawker. Some people of these people write for New York . Some of these people’s names are Sam Anderson.
I first stumbled upon the work of Sam Anderson when he very astutely reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows for New York .
http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/35534/
Upon reading the review I was linked to Sam’s previous Potter reading diary, which has to be one of the funniest things I’ve read in years.
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/07/
sam_andersons_deathly_hallows.html
And as if all of this weren’t enough, Mr. Anderson recently reviewed Alice Sebold’s sophomore effort, The Almost Moon, with considerable aplomb.
http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/38924/
My favorite line from that review: “It’s as if Harper Lee had decided to follow up To Kill a Mockingbird with To Manhandle a Cardinal, the story of a Mississippi lawyer who defends a Hispanic migrant worker from racist accusations.”
This line alone is enough to make a snobber like me fall in love.
After a lengthy web search and e-mail chain here at my place of business, the mystery of Sam Anderson remains. Is he straight? If so, he is most likely married, probably with children. So unfortunately I think a romance between the two of us is unlikely. I think the story with him is that he used to write for New York in the more general sense, and then was promoted to book critic. Dear Sam, if you’re out there, I love you. You represent everything I love about criticism. Your reviews are wonderfully written, funny, AND smart. Is it possible? I sort of want to be you, Sam Anderson. I could maybe be your publicist? Personal assistant? Protégé? Surely we can work something out.
My colleagues here at work tend to roll their eyes at New York mag. Obviously it isn’t the golden standard of “good writing,” necessarily, like The New Yorker . (Personal note: I’m not sure I even agree with that assertion: see my previous entry, “The New York School of Elitism.”)
However, I think New York is great. It’s always an entertaining read. The celebs they profile in the magazine tend to be interesting and most of the time, even if they aren’t, New York interviews them for being somehow out of their element. (Example: the recent piece on Jennifer Garner performing on Broadway). Yes, yes, they write on the length of Agyness Deyn’s hair and Amy Fisher. So what? The article in last week’s magazine about Gawker, “Everybody Sucks,” by Vanessa Grigoriadis, was pretty stunning, and I felt like everyone in publishing was talking about it.
http://nymag.com/news/features/39319/
Hell, everyone in New York is effected by Gawker, whether they like to admit to it or not. I find New York’s journalism refreshing and fascinating.
That said, New York will never join the ranks of The New Yorker. But maybe that’s a good thing. I mean, where else can one read about N+1 and Gossip Girl , sometimes even on the same page? I have a dream, dilettantes, that one day we’ll realize the beauty of low art, and all the goodies in between its guilty pleasures and high art’s elitist snobbery. I have to say kudos, though, to New York . You’re almost there.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Stress Kills, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love New York
I don’t have much of an excuse for the lack of updates on this blog, other than that the fact that I’ve been working more than full time, “studying” for the GRE, making connections with professors in Ph.D. departments, falling in love, and losing my mind, all at the same time. So, when my friend A. mentioned yesterday that I hadn’t updated this thing in quite some time, I figured, why not just write an entry about the perils of STRESS.
I have not been able to finish an entire meal (and believe me, I am as far from anorexic as they come—you could possibly even classify me as a “glutton” in some circles) in three weeks. I live for food. I love food. There is nothing better than a delicious steak with an arugula salad and baked potato on a chilly “it’s just beginning to turn autumn in New York where is my scarf” day. But every time I sit down to eat I am immediately confronted with the idea that I may not get into graduate school anywhere because my GRE scores are going to be so low that the admission committee will think I am mentally handicapped. I think about all those thin, regular sized envelopes appearing in my mailbox, and I just can’t do it.
Most of my conversations with my boyfriend (yeah, he’s new, dear reader, and wonderful) over the past two weeks have gone something like this:
“You’re so pretty.”
“Thanks!” (complete with schoolgirl blush)
*lapse of two minutes in conversation*
“WHAT’S WRONG?”
“What do you mean?”
“WHY ARE YOU SO QUIET, OMG?!”
“I wasn’t quiet, I was just thinking!”
“DO YOU HATE ME?”
“No! I love you!”
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
(I think this scene pretty much speaks for itself).
And then of course there’s the “it’s Saturday afternoon but I’m just going to take some time to work on my research proposal OH MY GOD I HAVE WRITERS BLOCK WHAT MAKES ME THINK I COULD EVER BE A SCHOLAR I CAN’T FEEL MY HANDS OH GOD” syndrome, which usually concludes with a phone called placed to my mom in which I weep inconsolably for several minutes before retiring to read the new US Weekly.
Then it dawned on me: I can’t teach myself math. My math score on the GRE is going to be foul. It’s going to stink from here to high heaven. There’s not much I can do about that. And hey, when I took my practice tests my verbal score was actually pretty good and I did worlds better on the practice literature exam than I thought I would. Yeah, so my proposal sucked. Well, I rewrote it! And you know, it’s actually kind of interesting now. How did this happen? How did I get from Point “I want to die, motherfuckers” to Point “Weird, everything might work out” ?
I started to appreciate what I’ve got. Which is a lot. I don’t think I could’ve come to the conclusion that I am doing my best in trying to get to a place in my life where I can feel like my work is something I believe in without the support of my friends, my man, and my family. And then there’s New York. In the past few weeks, I have been to more theater, seen more movies, met more people, and tried new things than I ever have before. I ate Ethiopian food for the first time. I saw the National Ballet Theater of Spain perform a piece about Castrati, I went to Dim Sum in Chinatown. I went to Roosevelt Island on that scary thing from “Dark Water” (yeah, you know what I’m talking about) and it was actually really beautiful. I put a piece of raw squid in my mouth (I promptly removed it), and for the first time, I realized that faith and trust in yourself goes a long way—it gives you the strength to put your trust in others and believe in yourself, which is a gift no one else can give to you, no matter how hard they try. And that, my friends, is a cure for stress. I’m still working on the unreasonable freak-outs and lack of appetite, but I’ll keep you updated. Hopefully soon I might even be well enough to write a real entry on this thing. God knows there’s a lot I want to discuss.
I have not been able to finish an entire meal (and believe me, I am as far from anorexic as they come—you could possibly even classify me as a “glutton” in some circles) in three weeks. I live for food. I love food. There is nothing better than a delicious steak with an arugula salad and baked potato on a chilly “it’s just beginning to turn autumn in New York where is my scarf” day. But every time I sit down to eat I am immediately confronted with the idea that I may not get into graduate school anywhere because my GRE scores are going to be so low that the admission committee will think I am mentally handicapped. I think about all those thin, regular sized envelopes appearing in my mailbox, and I just can’t do it.
Most of my conversations with my boyfriend (yeah, he’s new, dear reader, and wonderful) over the past two weeks have gone something like this:
“You’re so pretty.”
“Thanks!” (complete with schoolgirl blush)
*lapse of two minutes in conversation*
“WHAT’S WRONG?”
“What do you mean?”
“WHY ARE YOU SO QUIET, OMG?!”
“I wasn’t quiet, I was just thinking!”
“DO YOU HATE ME?”
“No! I love you!”
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
(I think this scene pretty much speaks for itself).
And then of course there’s the “it’s Saturday afternoon but I’m just going to take some time to work on my research proposal OH MY GOD I HAVE WRITERS BLOCK WHAT MAKES ME THINK I COULD EVER BE A SCHOLAR I CAN’T FEEL MY HANDS OH GOD” syndrome, which usually concludes with a phone called placed to my mom in which I weep inconsolably for several minutes before retiring to read the new US Weekly.
Then it dawned on me: I can’t teach myself math. My math score on the GRE is going to be foul. It’s going to stink from here to high heaven. There’s not much I can do about that. And hey, when I took my practice tests my verbal score was actually pretty good and I did worlds better on the practice literature exam than I thought I would. Yeah, so my proposal sucked. Well, I rewrote it! And you know, it’s actually kind of interesting now. How did this happen? How did I get from Point “I want to die, motherfuckers” to Point “Weird, everything might work out” ?
I started to appreciate what I’ve got. Which is a lot. I don’t think I could’ve come to the conclusion that I am doing my best in trying to get to a place in my life where I can feel like my work is something I believe in without the support of my friends, my man, and my family. And then there’s New York. In the past few weeks, I have been to more theater, seen more movies, met more people, and tried new things than I ever have before. I ate Ethiopian food for the first time. I saw the National Ballet Theater of Spain perform a piece about Castrati, I went to Dim Sum in Chinatown. I went to Roosevelt Island on that scary thing from “Dark Water” (yeah, you know what I’m talking about) and it was actually really beautiful. I put a piece of raw squid in my mouth (I promptly removed it), and for the first time, I realized that faith and trust in yourself goes a long way—it gives you the strength to put your trust in others and believe in yourself, which is a gift no one else can give to you, no matter how hard they try. And that, my friends, is a cure for stress. I’m still working on the unreasonable freak-outs and lack of appetite, but I’ll keep you updated. Hopefully soon I might even be well enough to write a real entry on this thing. God knows there’s a lot I want to discuss.
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